Figure on purple cushions – a painting a day

I looked groggily at my mug of tea in bed this morning against a blue sheet and wondered if it could be arranged into something pleasing for a still life …then realised that what would be pleasing was the hot stuff inside the cup. Oh! that’s what it’s for!

Moving on swiftly so as not to dwell on the breakfast time that followed, it is an absolutely stunning day again and the sky that I can see from here is as pure as we will ever see it. Nothing is there but quiet blueness.

Outside the garden has reached that exit velocity stage it is leaving the orbit of my complete control. I am flattering myself here I have only partial control at the very best of times.

Earlier in the spring the gardener looks from one tiny pocket of treasure to the next as the carefully placed daffodils come up and the nurtured winter flowering shrubs do their best in appalling conditions. Now however the strength of the sun is giving all the life out there the power to be spontaneous. Tiny dog violets arise and flower in the uncut grass, goosegrass seedlings turn from something small and ambiguous to something reaching lustily for the sky in a few days. Weeds that were kept down by the winter have managed to germinate, grow and flower already…bittercress is one of the ones I most loathe it’s so fast off the mark, I have also found a speedwell under a bush which has already set seed. Then there are the accursed dandelions which I enjoyed seeing in the verges on the way to Shropshire, I dig them, top them, generally give them the worst time but up they come as cheerful and rude as ever.

The briony is growing too this one is almost as bad as greater bindweed it is very persistent and the birds spread the seed which sets liberally on the school’s chainlink fence across the road. Its favourite place to germinate and thrive is in a thicket containing roses and or berberis, somewhere you just do not want to go, there it quietly builds a tuber underground and settles in lacing its tendrils through the backgrowth so that you don’t see it until it reaches the light on top of the bush.

Today I have done something different, instead of a picture from life I have worked from one of my life drawings. This was one where I worked from the background shapes forward to the figure. In other words instead of drawing the shapes of the figure, you draw or paint the shapes you can see behind leaving a silhouette of the figure. It does work and is good for getting over assumptions about what a body looks like.